Cenotaph

C.J. Lavigne

CENOTAPH

by C.J. Lavigne

(Content Warnings: dealing with a break up, loss, grief, sadness)

I’ve already been on shift for three hours when the statue comes in. Some guy in a puffy coat holds the door for her.

She’s got snow crumbling off her head and shoulders, little rivulets of melt running down her carved hair. She’s grime-dulled marble, not well-maintained, with grey streaks running from her shoulder down through that hint of sculpted gown. Her face is young, but she is not: her hair is pitted, and there’s a crack running down her left cheek, just to the edge of her mouth. Her right wrist is chipped. Her nose is still pert and smooth, though, and her eyes have the unseeing gloss of a once-polished finish. 

There’s one little clean, bright space on her gown, just down at her knee—one of those spots that countless people have touched, wearing it down slowly with each affectionate fingertip. 

The statue stands in line, politely, and I ignore her. The café is a little crowded—it’s just coming up on lunch—but people give her space. This is the city, and she’s not bothering anyone.

The line progresses. Non-fat Caramel Cappuccino. One-Pump Hazelnut Latte. Small Coffee, Black.

I finish with Mr. Extra Foam Half-Caf Soy Latte—his name on the cup is Gerald—and then the statue’s next in line. She glides up to the cash. 

I have to look at her now. Frost thaws along the side of her nose. “What can I get you?” I ask, but she just stands there. Her eyes are marble blank.

People are waiting behind her, so finally I punch in a cappuccino. “That’ll be four thirty-five,” I say, without much hope, because I don’t think she’s got a wallet anywhere in that stone dress. 

I don’t feel like dealing with this. I dig out my phone and slide my own card under the scanner. My day just got four dollars and thirty-five cents less profitable. “You can pick up your order to the left.”

She moves—and don’t ask me how a statue moves. I can’t explain it. She doesn’t walk; she’s got some way of gliding across the floor. My eyes can’t follow. I can only picture the pedestal she’s left empty behind her.

We’re short staffed, which means I make her coffee and I slide it across the counter. The statue just stands there, grimy hands pressed to her chest. “Your drink,” I prompt, which does no good. A long moment later, I write STATUE on the cup. That seems to appease her, even though she doesn’t take the thing. Instead, she glides back out the door when the next customer walks in—some startled guy who apologizes when she brushes past him.

I set the coffee to the side, for me, for later. I paid for it, anyway.

“Do you know her?” asks the next lady who comes up to the cash—older, benignly curious, her hair in a loose grey braid.

“No.” I lie, and I don’t feel bad about it. “What can I get you?”

#

It’s dark by the time I get home. The silence of the place is new enough that I’m still startled by it. Not even the cat greets me. We—I—don’t have a cat anymore. 

There’s still plenty of fur around, clinging to my pants or rolling in tufts across the cheap parquet flooring. I haven’t swept. The place smells like dust and… I should probably scrub the bathroom, too. 

I should do a lot of things. Let’s not talk about the kitchen. If they find my body under a pile of takeout containers, well… I knew the risk I was taking.

I shove aside a mass of unfolded laundry so I can drop down on the couch. I’m pondering pizza or pizza, and I’m sitting there in the dark when a white figure looms at the window and I just about scream.

Okay, I scream a little.

She’s a ghost behind faded gauze curtains, and it takes me a second to realize I’m not about to be murdered. I stalk to the patio door, shove the curtains aside, and step out.

It’s cold and dark and my feet are bare. The statue’s just lurking there, posture perfect, face stone-blank.

“Get fucked,” I tell her—as politely as possible under the circumstances. Then I go back inside and go to bed. I don’t need pizza that badly.

She’s gone in the morning. I think about upper floor apartments.

#

I hate winter. I hate that it’s cold. I hate that the sidewalks are slippery with ice and the marks of everyone else’s frozen footsteps. I hate remembering her hand in mine, and how it was warm then, and she would walk next to me, carrying a basket, letting me carry the blanket. The sunlight dappled the trees.

Now the cemetery park at the end of the street is closed and dark. The tree branches are just jagged fingers, bare and gnarled and reaching for the sky. 

I glimpse a white figure, just there under the spreading shadows, and I look away. “No,” I say firmly, to no one. 

I’m late for work.

#

I seek solace in the bookshop, where I can bury myself in the years before I knew her. The sunlight through the window illuminates the dust on the shelves; I inhale the smell of fresh paper, and the musty yellowing of the old. The store cat, a thin, aloof beast with emerald eyes and ratty grey fur, loafs obstinately just where the sunbeam hits the floor. I step over it on my way to the back; I know better than to try petting.

I can breathe here.

I do not expect to be undone by two young women in the historical fiction section. I don’t know them. They look like university students, loose thrift shop clothes and arms full of textbooks. They don’t notice me at the end of the row, when the taller one leans down to plant the lightest kiss on the tip of her girlfriend’s nose. 

That isn’t what eviscerates me. It’s the way she takes the other girl’s book when she leans back, adding it to her own pile. They both smile when they turn and drift past me on their way to the cash. The smaller girl has her hand just at the base of the other’s back—the lightest touch.

They are so happy.

I stand, one fist clenched, and I don’t watch them leave.

In the next aisle, the statue bides, her cupped hands holding a tattered volume open in front of her. The book has a blue cover, its pages mottled and warped by water. The sight of it shreds at the hole already carved by my own jealous grief. For a dizzy moment, I think she is extending the ruined pages toward me, the story spread and waiting.

She is only chiseled stillness.

She is watching me, though; her vacant eyes are intent. 

I imagine her lips parting, too.

“No,” I say. I leave with empty hands.

#

I can’t sleep anymore. I drop into bed unable to stir, unable to keep my eyes open, and I wake an hour later, staring at a ceiling hidden in blackness. I should be pleased that no one has stolen the covers; I’m too hot, though. I kick off the duvet. I crumple unwashed sheets beneath my hand and think about the morning shift. I count how many hours I could get if I went to sleep right now.

The room is dark. I have a headache.

I should be terrified when a moist blanket settles heavily over me. The thick yarn is unevenly woven, fringed raggedly at the edges and shockingly icy, smelling of mildew and rotting leaves. The bed shifts as some great weight pulls it down, the mattress springs screaming. I should shriek. Instead, I say, “Go away.” I grab at the edge of the mattress to try to keep myself from rolling back into the sinking side of the bed. Even so, my foot kicks at what shouldn’t be there—the hard, frozen smoothness of stone.

My trembling hands grip at polyester and padding. I wonder, if I roll backward, if she would embrace me.

“Go away,” I say again, and I hear it come out harsh, though not as harsh as I intend. “There’s nothing here. She’s gone.

My breathing is rough in the terrible silence. I cling to the edge of the bed.

The awful weight retreats, the ragged wetness sliding away. I lie flat, feeling only the empty space beside me, the sheets that smell of nothing but my own sweat and dust. I can still hear the air straining in my lungs.

I stare at the darkness and the shadow of the lamp. My glass of water is on the bedside table.

I don’t know if I was dreaming. But I am damp and shivering.

#

When I rise in the morning, I am alone. Outside my window, I see only a powdering of snow on the ground. There are no footprints—no dark square where a pedestal might have rested. I eat my cereal in peace.

#

I go to work. I make the coffee. I screw up a credit card charge and the manager yells at me, so I walk out. I’m tired of smelling like espresso anyway.

#

The bookstore is closed.

#

I walk.

The snow has mostly melted. Puddles bleed from the white clumps that still gather in shaded corners. My foot is soaked, and I should’ve worn a warmer coat; I hunch my shoulders and think about a hot shower.

I haven’t seen a single marble figure all day. I pass two men laughing; an older woman carrying a newspaper; a kid playing on a phone. They aren’t watching me. No one is paying any attention to me at all.

Without my job, I am realizing, I don’t have many other places to go.

I almost turn toward my apartment.

The fridge is empty, I remember, and the wifi was cut off last week. I forgot to transfer it to my name.

I keep walking.

I don’t really intend to end up at the cemetery. I mean, okay, maybe I’m thinking a little about the statue’s empty stare, or the weight of it crushing my queen-size. I just trudge along with frozen feet, and then I’m standing in front of the gate. Inside are the long rows of tombstones, half-frosted, lining the grass. Behind those are the trees and the mausoleums. 

The path is mud, and barely marked, but I walk it with my hands in my pockets and my head down. The trees are heavy and wet, and when I pass under them, pine branches scrape at my sleeves and leave chill moisture on my jacket. A single drop of water runs cold down the back of my neck.

The park isn’t as well tended as it used to be; I have to go through the overgrowth to get to the little clearing. We always liked the way it was hidden away; it had the aura of a secret being discovered. Now it just feels dark and neglected and sad.

The statue is where I knew she would be—still and placid, as though she’d never moved about the city, never followed me down a busy street or through aisles of tall shelving. She kneels on her pedestal next to a low, empty bench, almost lost beneath the overhang of heavy branches. Elsewhere in the cemetery, the trees are now barren; here the evergreens loom all year around, shedding the scent of sap and pine and leaving a carpet of needles on the ground. 

Everything is wet, including the lumpy fringed blanket hanging from the edge of the bench, and the two empty coffee cups now rolled away on the ground, and the book that lies face down on the seat, its pages crumpled. I don’t care about the blanket, but I pick up the littered cups and shove them in my bag, and I do feel bad about the book. I liked that one. I shouldn’t have thrown it there.

The statue has her hands over her face, posed like a weeping angel, though she hasn’t acquired any wings. The curve of her shoulders is bereft. I stand accused. 

“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “Look, we just haven’t come back because—there is no we. And I don’t want to sit here and hear it all again, in my head.”

I already can, just standing here. It’s not you, it’s me. We can be friends. Listen, aren’t you tired, too? “You know she gets that little tic at the edge of her mouth when she lies?” 

The statue doesn’t answer me. 

“Just… stop following me. I can’t make it better for you. I can’t even make it better for me.

My foot is still wet. The dampness of my jacket is seeping into my shirt, and I don’t know why I’m still standing here, except that the statue’s face is still hidden, her shoulders hunched in silent grief. 

I think she is watching me through her fingers.

I sigh, and I sit down on the bench—which is also wet, and feels too large with just me there. I lean down to pick up the book—wet—and attempt to smooth its swollen, muddy pages. For a while, I just slouch there; the leaves are dripping, and the cemetery is quiet, and the statue is waiting.

I look down at the sodden book, and I read aloud. “Alice said nothing: she had never been so much contradicted in her life before, and she felt that she was losing her temper.” I don’t know if this is the right page; I don’t remember where we left off. It doesn’t matter. I only remember that it was her turn last time, and she got four sentences in and stuttered to a stop before she looked at me, and the distance in her eyes made me go still and cold as stone.

I guess I know how the statue feels.

I guess it’s my chapter now.

I keep reading, my stumbling words filling the little clearing, and I remember warm hands and a soft blanket and a time when I wasn’t alone.

“I get it,” I tell the statue, between pages. “We left you alone too.” She doesn’t answer me, but she has lowered her hands to her lap, sitting demurely on her pedestal as she gazes toward the misty trees. Her lip is crusted with lichen.

I read to her. 

After a while, I’m shivering, and I feel the blanket drape over me, wet and weighted with ice. It doesn’t help, but it is laid with such care that my eyes blur, and I have to work to focus on the page. “I didn’t know that Cheshire cats always grinned; in fact, I didn’t know that cats could grin.”

There are hands stroking my hair, cool and gentle, heavy and cracked. They are not the hands I want.

I close my eyes. 

*With quotations from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll.

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C.J. Lavigne is the author of the urban fantasy novel In Veritas (NeWest Press, 2020). Her short fiction has been published in On Spec and Fusion Fragment. Her hobbies include petting the cat, drinking coffee, and being Canadian. Find her online at www.cjlavigne.com, or on Twitter @seajaylav.

“Cenotaph” can be found in Augur Magazine Issue 4.2.